Land of the Dead

Monday night was the Land of the Dead LA screening. What that meant for me (besides getting to see the movie) was lots and lots of phone calls to arrange a last-minute afterparty. Im such a loser.

Land of the Dead was an excellent zombie movie. Its really cool to see the humor and humanity of Romero back on the screen, and its equally cool to see that George Romero looks like he could be Stan Lees brother. I got a little bit of US foreign policy criticism on a couple levels out of the film, and will have to see it again to get specifics, but what does the film do if you read the zombies (who, in this film, are learning to think, reason, and work together) as muslims and the un-turned humans as the western world? Its an interesting thought, anyway. There were a couple of good zombie tricks in the movie, with a (nearly) headless zombie as my favorite, and I like that there were quite a few people that got bitten with no fanfare, just one minute theyre shooting or sitting there, then the next, theyre bit. Good way to keep the film from getting too precious.

The afterparty worked, but stayed small (less than half of our guest list resulted in attendees), and that was okay. We all walked out about one, and that was that. Nothing to see here, move along.

Last night I went to see a series of small vignette plays in Hollywood. Some turned out to be interesting, some didnt, and a trend that I noticed was that nothing happened in most of them. There wasnt even a sketch of an arc in some of the pieces – it was like the lights came up on a play in progress or a slice of life, then they went back down again some arbitrary time later. I didnt like that style when it was applied to film, and I dont like it in theatre. I guess Im just stuck in olds-ville or something. Give me stories, no matter how short. And poems that rhyme, while youre at it.

Its already Wednesday, I guess, or its only Wednesday. Dont know which. The Dispose-All in the sink is broken, dont know how, but who cares because Im never home anyway. Yesterday? Out at 8am, home at 11 – straight to bed, because Monday was 8am to 1am straight through. Dumb.